


Now My Watch Begins

by gardnerhill



Series: Brighton Memoirs [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, M/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-07
Updated: 2016-07-07
Packaged: 2018-07-22 06:48:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7424269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winter and influenza together make a formidable enemy for a doctor who is also a soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now My Watch Begins

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2016 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #7, **"Epidemic":** A word to strike fear into the hearts of men, but one that can be used in reference to giggles as easily as germs. How you choose to employ it is up to you.

Influenza. Everyone seemed to be ill, or recovering from illness, or coming down with illness.

I watched Watson go into battle as he must have done in Afghanistan, armed with his Gladstone instead of his Adams and grim-faced at the knowledge of the casualties he would be unable to prevent. Out he went into the dirty winter weather at all hours of the day and night; back he came in like fashion and timetable, haggard and coughing in exhaustion. He moved out of our room and back into his old bedroom upstairs, for his hours had become so irregular that he disliked awaking me by returning at dawn or leaving at 2 a.m. (his old bed, when he did not merely doze on the divan or in his chair, snatching an hour of rest like a soldier on watch).

I soon grew able to deduce how his night had gone from his expression (two children this time, one already dead upon his arrival, the other expiring despite hours of effort). I wanted to hold him close, kiss the lines from his face and let him weep for exhaustion in my embrace. But his attendance on so many others’ bedsides had taken him from his own. Soldier in this as in all he did, he turned away from gestures of sympathy during this battle; day in and day out, I saw only the hard grave face of the Fusilier.

I left him alone as he wished, busying myself with some pointless jewel-theft (only my province due to the pedigreed nature of both the gem and its owner who wanted none other than Sherlock Holmes investigating his dull little burglary). The case provided no points of interest, and the idleness let my imagination, that should be used only to track criminals, be turned against me; when I heard Watson drag his way into our rooms at dawn and cough over his tea and toast I pictured him collapsing in a sweat, moaning as the fever broiled his brain, and leaving me numb beside a cooling corpse in what had been our bed. And even over a scant breakfast the cursed telephone would ring, and he would only set down his napkin and take up his bag once again.

“They can’t all die, Holmes,” he told me once, voice flat. “Some of them must live, surely.” And for that thread of hope, that faint belief that he did not merely serve as harbinger for the undertaker, he went out again into the epidemic. I watched on the periphery, feeling as helpless as he must have done.

But even Pestilence wearies of his duty and alights from his steed. A day came in late March when I could read relief in Watson's careworn face (the child lived, though he would be weak and sickly for some time); when he slept for four hours at a time between summonses, and not two or three hours; when people began to emerge from their homes like crocuses out of the snow, well again if not yet hale.

And watching him doze on the divan with the exhaustion of a sentinel relieved of his watch, I sent a telegram to the proprietor of the Metropole hotel in Brighton to reserve a suite and to make arrangements for a nurse. My soldier had earned his leave.


End file.
